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Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist International

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2390276

1527-1900

Steve Ellner,

Anarchism and Radical Politics

This fascinating history of the efforts of the Soviet-led Communist International (Comintern) to found the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) sheds light on a series of challenges and knotty issues facing the foreign Communist emissaries sent to that nation. Much of the book is the product of research conducted by the author in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) following its opening to the public in the 1990s. Daniela Spenser notes some discrepancies between RGASPI documents on the PCM and other primary sources, such as published personal accounts also cited by the author. The book contrasts with original works published on the Comintern beginning in the 1950s, which were influenced by the anti-Communist setting of the Cold War and which focused on the impositions of Moscow while failing to analyze in depth the rich internal debate within the movement. Spenser’s book also corrects a subsequent tendency among scholars who, influenced by the new social movement paradigm, largely ignored the role of international actors and instead centered attention on social and political activists. Spenser, in her own words, seeks to “bring . . . the Communist International back into the picture” (p. 4) while humanizing its leading participants.Throughout the book, Spenser characterizes the Communist emissaries as idealistic and well intentioned, if not quixotic. For instance, the Comintern representative in Mexico, Sen Katayama, “wanted to see signs of hope” (p. 116) and “believed that the climate in Mexico was ideal for agitation and propaganda” (p. 99). He sent to the Comintern reports “filled with good news,” even while “the work that he was assigned to in Mexico had been interrupted” (p. 100). She adds that he scapegoated the anarcho-syndicalists, some of whom entered the PCM and opposed electoral participation and were even critical of the Soviet Union. Even though Katayama and other emissaries were “detached from the local reality” (p. 104), the issues they were grappling with were thorny, particularly given the “hybrid” nature of the governments of the 1910 revolution (p. 42), which raised nationalist banners but suppressed popular movements. During the period, the Communists formulated different, and at times contradictory, opinions of the governments of Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón, both of whom had mixed records as radicals. Carranza, for instance, ordered his generals to hunt down Emiliano Zapata but at the same time provided material support for the journalistic endeavors of US socialist Linn Gale, who at one point headed a Mexican Communist organization. Spenser points to similar inconsistencies on the part of Obregón.The evaluation of the governments of the Mexican Revolution hinged upon the larger theoretical issue of the role of the “national bourgeoisie” in Third World countries, a topic that became a major source of contention on the Left throughout the twentieth century. The book’s opening chapter examines the debate in Moscow, which divided Soviet leaders over political strategy for the Third World. Lenin, among others, argued that, given the Third World’s backward, semifeudal conditions, the working class there was incapable of spearheading socialist revolution and instead had to ally itself with progressive elements of the bourgeoisie. While Comintern agent M. N. Roy, who was stationed in Mexico, was skeptical of “bourgeois nationalism” (p. 16), famed US journalist John Reed held an opposing point of view. In her discussion of the issue, Spenser would have done well to summarize and contrast the positions of the leading foreign Communists who were politically active in Mexico.A related issue that also divided Comintern leaders was the revolutionary prospects for Third World countries. At one extreme, Nikolai Bukharin and Grigori Zinoviev saw little possibility for revolution there due to backward objective conditions. Other participants at Comintern congresses expressed less pessimistic positions, including influential Communists based in Mexico, who were among the most optimistic. Roy, for instance, argued that the capitalist system depended on the superprofits derived from the Third World and that thus “colonial liberation was the essential prerequisite for the overthrow of the capitalist system in Europe” (p. 17). He viewed Mexico as (in his words) “the promised land” and “in a state of permanent revolution” (p. 43). Reed and Louis Fraina, who were leaders of rival Communist parties in the United States and played influential roles in Mexico, were also among the optimists. This diversity of positions regarding the propitiousness of the conditions for revolution contrasts with Manuel Caballero’s sweeping conclusion in Latin America and the Comintern, 1919–1943 (1986) that for Comintern leaders Latin America would be the last place in the sequence of the global revolutionary process. In short, Spenser effectively analyzes the contrasting positions on the theoretical and practical issues defended by international Communists in the largely adverse climate of Mexico. She also relates the internal discussions of the Communist movement in Mexico to the larger picture of developments at the world level during the early years of the Soviet revolution.